ABSTRACT
This article discusses how Spanish filmmaker Icíar Bollaín and Asian American poet Cathy Song relate to the art of photography in strikingly similar ways. Both artists show a keen interest in photographs as cultural and as social artifacts. Numerous aspects of photography, both as a material product and as a cultural statement, will be considered, as this article proposes that a storytelling urge becomes summoned every time one chooses to take, pose for, and look at a photograph. In other words, the photographer, the poser, and the spectator cannot escape the desire to construct a story around photography. Both Bollaín’s Flores de otro mundo and Song’s Picture Bride show us how every photographic object begets a story that configures a community in the present or to come.